One of the popular things to do nowadays is create video content for YouTube, but the problem is it often needs quite a sophisticated set up, especially if you’re trying to do something like record videos of you playing a game on your computer or similar.
Now there’s Screencast Capture Lite, which is a really cool little freeware program which lets you grab video and audio from your Windows computer screen quickly and easily. The program is fully open source, and comes with a variety of useful settings to help you make the most of the recordings.
You can capture mouse clicks and the cursor, as well as select whether you want the whole screen, or just a window or region. What we like most about it, is there’s no bloat. All you get is the stuff you really need, nothing else. Which makes for a really easy to use interface.
To get going just select what kind of capture you want, make sure your mike (and/or webcam) is selected too, and hit the Start Recording button, top right of the box. This activates the record standby mode, and when you’re ready (e.g. you’ve set up the region by dragging and dropping the yellow boundary markers), click on the icon in the task bar and you’ll immediately be recording everything that happens on screen, along with your vocal audio.
It produces really great quality video and the file size is not huge either, because of the sophisticated compression used. The only caveat we found is you might need to first convert the .avi output to .wmv etc with something like Freemake Converter if you have problems with your default video editing program (as we did with Adobe Premiere Elements).
The Lite designation implies there’ll be a Pro commercial version along soon, but we hope the developer won’t cripple this version in any way when and if that happens.